In the 1980s America won the cold war. In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. The decade
that followed proved one of the most extraordinary periods in economic history.
The American business model – the unrestrained pursuit of self interest,
market fundamentalism, the minimal state and low taxation – offered its
followers the same certainties that Marxism had given its own adherents for
the previous century. There was a New Economy.
It was all to end in a frenzy of speculation, followed by recrimination and
self-doubt. Corporations that had never earned a cent of profit, and never would,
were sold to investors for billions of dollars. Corporate executives would fill
their pockets and invent revenues and profits to support their accounts of their
own genius. And every international economic meeting would be besieged by demonstrators.
In this ambitious and wide-ranging book, John Kay unravels the truth about markets.
He explains why market economies outperformed socialist or centrally directed
ones, but also why the imposition of market institutions often fails. Kay’s
search for the truth about markets takes him from the shores of Lake Zürich
to the streets of Mumbai, through evolutionary psychology and moral philosophy,
to the flower market at San Remo and Christies’ saleroom in New York.
Through this range of material he shows that market economies function because
they are embedded in a social, political and cultural context, and cannot work
otherwise.
The Truth about Markets examines the big questions of economics – why
some countries and people are rich, and others poor, why businesses succeed
and fail, the scope of markets, and their limits. Witty yet profound, immersed
in the most recent economic thinking yet completely accessible, it is both a
tract for our times and a text for a new political economy.